The new experimental ZMapp Ebola therapy appears to be working, maybe, and there is new money for Ebola treatment on the ground in Africa, plus a possible vaccine going into trials.
Ebola trial drug given to 'improving' US aid workers
More on this treatment below the fold, along with the vaccine.
Ebola crisis: World Bank announces $200m emergency fund
The BBC's Paul Blake in Washington says that in the the short term, the money will be used to pay health workers, dispel rumours about the disease in local communities and address the immediate needs of getting sick people into health facilities.
World Bank President
Dr. Jim Yong Kim is an infectious diseases specialist, a co-founder and formerly Executive Director of
Partners in Health in Haiti, who turned around WHO policy on treatment of MDR-TB (Multiple Drug Resistant Tuberculosis) from letting patients die to treating them effectively. He says
We have a responsibility to that particular region of Africa.
Before we come to more of the real news, we need to be aware of some recent RWNJ lies on Ebola for partisan political gain. It is not quite true that nothing is too vile for the worst of these people. We can tell that because they keep getting worse.
Limbaugh: The Left Will Politicize Ebola Just Like They Politicized AIDS
Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey: Amid the "crisis at our southern border," there are "reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as … Ebola virus."
Fox News: Ebola outbreak fuels concerns over health risks along US-Mexico border
The usual reaction to having lies debunked and predictions fail on the Right is to double down. I Dairied that yesterday in Grokking Republicans: Cognitive Dissonance.
We also have to deal with rumors, scientific quackery, and CTs being spread in Africa and around the world. CT and superstition about Ebola and about health workers in general is rife in Africa. It ranges from AIDS and Ebola both being CIA creations to lurid tales of cannibalism in hospitals. No, I don't have any idea how you get there from here.
Ebola conspiracy theories spreading fast as outbreak travels round globe - was deadly virus created in laboratory?
Unfortunately, some of them have some currency in the pseudoscientific and more general CT fringe elsewhere. Dentist Leonard Horowitz is the leading combined AIDS and Ebola CT-er. He has infected Rev. Jeremiah Wright, once Barack Obama's pastor, and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam with these views, among others. Some anti-vaxxers have picked it up, too.
Now, back to the evidence-based world, in which you can't catch Ebola from a sneeze, or a child from Guatemala, or a CIA agent. Well, almost evidence-based. This New York Times headline is factually incorrect.
Patients’ Symptoms Raise Concern About Ebola in New York
The actual story is that the very few patients coming in after returning from Africa with diarrhea and vomiting are systematically being found not to have Ebola. There was another one over the weekend.
So never mind that. Take necessary precautions, don't get excited. Now, real evidence:
Ebola: Experimental treatments
There are multiple lines of attack on Ebola, including antibody treatment and a promising vaccine that will soon be in safety trials and then clinical trials under the utmost precautions. Researchers and regulators are thinking hard about where to go next. There is no practical possibility of a commercial Ebola vaccine, so possibilities for government or international funding are also the subjects of intense discussion.
To go back to the ZMapp treatment, involving three monoclonal antibodies attacking different segments of the virus, there is no way to tell whether the two aid workers now being treated for Ebola in advanced facilities in the US were already recovering, or whether the treatment turned them around or sped up the recovery. You can't tell from only two patients with no controls, and a controlled experiment on Ebola patients, treating some with ZMapp but not others in the same facility, would be highly unethical.
Nevertheless, plans are being made to have this treatment approved and stockpiled either for this outbreak if it remains uncontrolled that long, or for any future outbreaks.
Also,
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says clinical trials are to start in September on an Ebola vaccine that has shown promising results during tests on animals.
The race to find a vaccine or treatment to stop Ebola
Dr. Fauci:
We tested it in monkeys, it looks very good, it protects monkeys completely from challenge with Ebola. They don't get sick and they don't die, whereas unvaccinated monkeys all do. We're going to start human trials in September in normal volunteers. And if that looks good, by January we should be able to scale up in its production.
That kind of volunteering is nearly at the level of
Dr. Jesse William Lazear, who let himself be bitten by mosquitoes carrying yellow fever as part of the Walter Reed experiments with the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba a century ago, and died as a result, thus proving transmission by mosquitoes. He did not tell his fellow researchers of his plan in advance, however, and had no possibility of effective treatment.
I got the yellow fever vaccine as preparation for going to South Korea in the Peace Corps in 1967, and had a mild case in reaction to it that night. As soon as I realized what was happening, I went to bed, and was fine in the morning. These Ebola trials are not going to be as simple as that. Volunteers who get the vaccine and then an exposure to Ebola will have to be kept in the strictest quarantine at maximum biohazard level for a month. Longer if any of them become infected but can be kept alive.
Anyway, if the trials work, the production volume has to be sufficient to vaccinate everybody who comes into contact with any Ebola patients, and anybody who comes into contact with them. That is tens of thousands of people to start, and more as the process goes on.
This is the drill that eradicated smallpox in the wild, with wider and wider circles of vaccination as the cases became fewer. It is the drill currently under way against polio, which would have succeeded by now but for CT among Muslims that the vaccine is meant to sterilize them, and the CIA-sponsored fake vaccination program used in the hunt for bin Laden in Pakistan. The result is that health workers have been murdered in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and cannot go into some of the remaining polio hot spots in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to vaccinate any more children.